From a
speculative write up on big data processor roadmaps:
Just for fun, and to show what a different world it is that Big Blue operates in, we added the Power and z processors to the middle of the Arm pack. We expect “Cirrus+” Power11 and “Telum II” z17 processors before the end of this year to boost the performance of the Power Systems and System z mainframe lines. The Power11 chip, which we will cover shortly, is all about increasing memory bandwidth and memory capacity compared to the Power10 chip the has been in the field for nearly four years now. The z17 processor has a bunch of tweaks, including an integrated DPU to speed up I/O operations for mainframes, which we covered back in August 2024. Both of these chips are etched by Samsung, IBM’s processor fab partner, and both have sixteen cores on a socket and are implemented in machines that have four sockets in a node, four nodes in a single system image, and tens of terabytes of main memory hanging off of them.
Big iron is truly different.
I'll admit to not having been paying attention to things after IBM mucked up with nonfree memory controllers, but was surprised to see sixteen cores being referenced. Despite other material suggesting 25% more cores as compared to POWER10 (which was also configured with 16 cores).
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